I just got a tilt gauge, but it's kinda beaten up. No one's posted how to fix one up yet, so I will! :D

I bought off ebay a tilt gauge like so :

http://www.westonindustries.net/suzuki/suzuki-Thumbnails/17.jpg

It's off of a Mitsubishi Delica 4wds. It would look better in a zuk..

wolfgang

01-31-2006, 11:17 PM

Step one: Dissassmble your gauge.

On mine there was 6 screws on back to split the gauge apart. Notice on this picture :

http://www.westonindustries.net/suzuki/suzuki-Images/18.jpg

They were regular phillips screws, so just take them out. Some of mine were stuborn and broke the plastic. It does not matter because I am not re-using it. Your case should split like this:

http://www.westonindustries.net/suzuki/suzuki-Images/19.jpg

I'm not going to reuse the tempurature sensor, so I left that in the case. The two gauges I am going to use I extract from the front panel. There are 4 more phillips screws here. Take them out, and put them aside. (I don't know If I am going to be re-using them yet, but prob not) the two gauge faces will still be attached to the front bezel, and you should have something like this

http://www.westonindustries.net/suzuki/suzuki-Images/20.jpg

wolfgang

01-31-2006, 11:23 PM

Now extract the gauge fronts. These are held on by little black plastic crap. carefully pop them off with an exacto. You can see the black dots in the following picture. The gauge face to the left (yellow and white) is the back of the tilt meter, the other one is the altimeter.

http://www.westonindustries.net/suzuki/suzuki-Images/21.jpg

After you get them out, you should have two sets of gauges and gauge faces, This picture is of just the altmeter, and it's gauge face.

NOTICE THE MARKINGS SO YOU CAN GET IT LINED UP AGAIN! Make them with a sharpie, or simillar. I have three markings, unequaly spaced, so there is only one way to line it up (no which way is up...)

http://www.westonindustries.net/suzuki/suzuki-Images/22.jpg

Here's a picture of everything extracted, with the tools by it. The altmeter "true knob" was held on by a flathead screwdriver, you can barely see it behind the altemeter. It's white, and from my cpu kit.

http://www.westonindustries.net/suzuki/suzuki-Images/23.jpg

wolfgang

01-31-2006, 11:54 PM

Ok, now that everything is in pieces, on to step 2. The computer stuff...

All of my computer stuff was done on Windows with photoshop 6, a OneTouch bargan scanner, and a cannon i550 color photo printer. The pictures were taken with my Cannon Digital camera, and processed on my iBook.

Dust off your scanner, and drop the gauge face on it. Scan it at half of the best resolution your printer can print at. Mine prints at 600DPI, so I am scanning everything at 300DPI. All of the scans I do are done with my used OneTouch $60 scanner. If you don't have a scanner pm me and I can help. My scan looked like this:

http://www.westonindustries.net/suzuki/Tilt-1.jpg

The gauge looks a little beat up, but we can fix it... we have the technology... anyway... I called that layer background. I know not very original....

We next isoate the round shape of the gauge and create a mask. In my case I made two layers, one black consisting of a circle the diameter of the outside and another white layer consisting of a smaller diameter circle. I then selected the white layer (which is on top), and and picked layers -> merge down. I called this layer Layer two. It looks like this:

http://www.westonindustries.net/suzuki/Tilt-2.jpg

wolfgang

02-01-2006, 12:06 AM

Now we have to pick the colors, and the font. I found a font I liked on dafont.com called babylon 5. Here's a link if you want to take a look

http://www.dafont.com/font.php?file=babylon5

Now I need three colors, one for the ground / upper lettering, one for the sky / lower lettering, and one for the pointers.

for the ground / upper lettering I picked a green color (rgb: 102, 153, 102), and for the sky / lower lettering I picked a cream color (rgb: 255, 255, 204), and for the pointer I picked a red color (rgb: 153, 51, 51)

Now that we have our colors let's go! Set your forground / working color to your ground color, and turn the whole circle that color (on a new layer, called wholeCircle) Mine looks like this:

http://www.westonindustries.net/suzuki/Tilt-3.jpg

Now select the top half (select using layer background, copy on layer wholeCircle) and copy it to a new layer. I'm calling this upperCircle. Color it the sky color. Here's a picture of how it looks with just that layer: